[Music] for decades the technology industry had marched the cadence of moore's law it was a familiar pattern system oems would design in the next generation of intel microprocessors every couple of years or so maybe bump up the memory ranges periodically and the supporting hardware would kind of go along for the ride upgrading its performance and bandwidth system designers they might beef up the cash maybe throwing some more spinning disk spindles at the equation to create a balanced environment and this was pretty predictable and consistent in the pattern and was reasonably straightforward compared to today's challenges this is all changed the confluence of cloud distributed global networks the diversity of applications ai machine learning and the massive growth of data outside of the data center requires new architectures to keep up as we've reported the traditional moore's law curve is flattening and along with that we've seen new packages with alternative processors like gpus npus accelerators and the like and the rising importance of supporting hardware to offload tasks like storage and security and it's created a massive challenge to connect all these components together the storage the memories and all of the enabling hardware and do so securely at very low latency at scale and of course cost effectively this is the topic of today's segment the shift from a world that is cpu centric to one where the connectivity of the various hardware components is where much of the innovation is occurring and to talk about that there is no company who knows more about this topic than broadcom and with us today is jazz tremblay who was general manager data center solutions group at broadcom jazz welcome to thecube hey dave thanks for having me really appreciate it yeah you bet now broadcom is a company that a lot of people might not know about i mean but the vast majority of the internet traffic flows through broadcom products like pretty much all of it it's a company with trailing 12-month revenues of nearly 29 billion and a 240 billion dollar market cap jazz what else should people know about broadcom well they've uh 99 of the internet traffic goes through broadcom silicon or devices and i think what people are not often aware of is how breath it is it starts with the devices phones and tablets that use our wi-fi technology or rf filters and then those connect to access points either at home at work or public access points using your wi-fi technology and if you're working from home you're using a residential or broadband gateway and that uses broadcom technology also from there you go to access networks core networks and eventually you'll work your way into the data center all connected by bartcom so really we're at the heart of enabling this connectivity ecosystem and we're at the core of it we're a technology company we invest about five billion dollars a year in r d and as you were saying or last year we achieved 27.5 billion of revenue and our mission is really to connect the ecosystem to enable what you said this transformation around the data centric world so talk about your scope of responsibility what's your what's your role generally and specifically with storage so i've been with the company for 16 years and i head up the data center solutions group which includes three product franchises a pci fabric storage connectivity and broadcom ethernet nics so my chart and my team's charter is really server connectivity inside the data center and and what specifically is broadcom doing in storage jazz so it's been quite a journey uh over the past eight years we've made a series of acquisition and built up a pretty impressive storage portfolio this first started with lsi and that's where i came from and the team here came from lsi that had two product franchises around storage the first one was server connectivity hba raid expanders for ssds and hdds the second product group was actually chips that go inside the hard drives so socs and preamps so that was an acquisition that we made and actually that's how i came into the broadcom group through lsi the next acquisition we made was plx the industry's leader in pcie fabrics they've been doing pcie switches for about 15 years we acquired the company and really saw an acceleration in the requirements for nvme attach and ai ml fabrics very specialized low latency fabrics after that we acquired a large system and software company brocade and dave if you recall brocade they're the market leader in fiber channel switching this is where if you're a financial or government institution you want to build a mission critical ultra secure really best in class storage network following brocade acquisition we acquired mulx that is now the number one provider of fibre channel adapters inside servers and the last acquisition for this puzzle was was actually broadcom where avago acquired broadcom and took on the broadcom name and there we acquired um ethernet switching capabilities and ethernet adapters that go into storage servers or external storage systems so with all this it's been quite the journey to build up this portfolio uh we're number one in each of these storage product categories and we now have four divisions that are focused on storage connectivity you know that's quite remarkable when you think about i mean i know all these companies that you were talking about and they were they were very quality companies but they were kind of bespoke and the fact that you had the vision to kind of connect the dots and now take responsibility for that integration we're going to talk about what that means in terms of competitive advantage but but i wonder if we could zoom out and maybe you could talk about the key storage challenges and elaborate a little bit on why connectivity is now so so important like what are the trends that are driving that shift that we talked about earlier from a cpu-centric world the one that's connectivity-centric i think at broadcom we recognize the importance of storage and storage connectivity and if you look at data centers whether it be private public cloud or hybrid data centers they're getting inundated with data if you look at the digital universe it's growing at about 23 keger day so over a course of four to five years you're doubling the amount of new information and that poses really two key challenges for the infrastructure the first one is you have to take all this data and for a good chunk of it you have to store it be able to access it and protect it the second challenge is you actually have to go and analyze and process this data and doing this at scale that's the uh the key challenge and what we're seeing these data centers uh getting a tsunami of data and historically they've been cpu-centric architectures and what that means is the cpu is at the heart of the data center and a lot of the workloads are processed by software running on the cpu we believe that we're currently transforming the architecture from cpu centric to connectivity centric and what we mean by connectivity centric is you architect your data center thinking about the connectivity first and the goal of the connectivity is to use all the components inside the data center the memory the spinning media the flash storage the networking the specialized accelerators the fpga all these elements and use them for what they're best at to process all this data and the goal uh dave is really to drive down power and deliver the performance so that we can achieve all the innovation we want inside the data centers so it's really a shift from cpu centric to uh bringing in more specialized components and architecting the the connectivity inside the data center to help we think that's a really important part okay so you have this need for connectivity at scale you mentioned and you're dealing with massive massive amounts of data i mean we're going to look back the last decade and say oh that you've seen nothing compared to to the when we get to 2030. but you at the same time you have to control costs so what are the technical challenges to achieving that vision so it's really challenging it's it's not that complex to build up faster bigger solution if you have no cost or or power budget and really the key challenges that our team is facing working with customers is first i'd say it's architectural challenges so we would all like to have one fabric that i think to connect all the devices and bring us all the characteristics that we need but the reality is we can't we can't do that so you need distinct fabrics inside the data center and you need them to work together you'll need an ethernet backbone in some cases you'll need a fiber channel network in some cases you'll need a small fabric for thousands or hundreds of thousands of hdds you will need pcie fabrics for aiml servers and and one of the key architectural challenges is which fabric do you use when and how do you develop these fabrics to meet their purpose-built needs the that's one thing the second architectural challenge dave is what i challenge my team with is example how do i double bandwidth while reducing net power double bandwidth reducing that power how do i take a storage controller and increase the iops by 10x and will i locate only 50 more power budget so that equation requires tremendous uh innovation and that's really what we focus on and power is becoming more and more important in that equation so you've got decisions from an architecture perspective as to which fabric to use you've got this architectural challenge around we need to innovate and do things smarter better to drive down power while delivering more performance then if you take those things together the problem statement becomes more complex so you've had these silicon devices with complex firmware on them that need to interoperate with multiple devices they're getting more and more complex so there's execution challenges and what we need to do and what we're investing to do is shift left quality so to do these complex devices they come out tight time to market with high quality and one of the key things that we've invested in is emulation of the environment before you tape out your silicon so effectively taking the application software running it on an emulation environment making sure that works running your tests before you tape out and that ensures quality silicon so it's it's challenging but the team loves challenges and that's kind of what we're facing on one hand architectural challenges on the other hand a new level of execution challenges so you're you're compressing the time to final tape out you know versus maybe traditional techniques and then you mentioned architecture my am i right jazz that you're essentially from an architectural standpoint trying to minimize the because your latency is so important you're trying to minimize the amount of data that you have to move around and actually bringing you know compute to the data is that the right way to think about it well i think there's multiple parts of the problem one of them is you need to do more data transactions example data protection with rate algorithms we need to do millions of transactions per second and the only way to achieve this with the minimal power impact is to hardware accelerate these that's one piece of investment the other investment is um you're absolutely right dave so it's shuffling the data around the data center so in the data center in some cases you need to have multiple pieces of the puzzle multiple ingredients processing the same data at the same time and you need advanced methodologies to share the data and avoid moving it all over the data center so that's another big piece of investment that we're focused on okay yeah so let's let's stay on that because i see this as disruptive you talk about spending five billion dollars you know a year in r d um and talk a little bit more about the disruptive technologies or the supportive technologies that you're introducing specifically to support this vision so let's break it down in a couple couple big industry problems that our team is focused on so the first one is i'll take an enterprise workload database if you want the fastest running database you want to utilize local storage nvme based drives and you need to protect that data and raid is the mechanism of choice to protect your data in local environments and there what we need to do is really just do the transactions a lot faster historically the storage has been a bit of a bottleneck in these types of applications for example our newest generation product we're doubling the bandwidth increasing iops by 4x but more importantly we're accelerating rate rebuilds by 50x and that's important dave if you are using a database in some cases you limit the size of that database based on how fast you can do those rebuilds so this 50x acceleration and rebuilds is something we're getting a lot of good feedback on for customers the the last metric we're really focused on is right latency so how fast can the cpu send the right to the storage connectivity subsystem and commit it to drives and we're improving that by 60x generation of regeneration so we're talking fully loaded latency 10 microseconds so from an enterprise workload it's about data protection much much faster using nvme drives that's one big problem the other one is if you're um if you look at dave youtube facebook tick tock the amount of user generated content specifically video content that they're producing on an hour-by-hour basis is mind-boggling and the hyperscale customers are really counting on us to help them scale the connectivity of hundreds of thousands of hard drive to store and access all that data in a very reliable way so there we're leading the industry in the transition to 24 gig sas and multi-actuator drives third big problem is around aiml servers so these are some of the highest performance servers that they basically need super low latency connectivity between gp gpus networking nvme drives cpus and orchestrate that all together and the fabric of choice for that is pcie fabric so here we're talking about 150 nanosecond latency in a pcie fabric fully non-blocking very reliable and here we're helping the industry transition from pca gen 4 to pcie gen 5. and the last piece is okay i've got a aiml server i have a storage system with hard drives or a storage server in the enterprise space all these devices systems need to be connected to the ethernet backbone and my team is heavily investing in ethernet mix transitioning to 100 gig 200 gig 400 gig and putting capabilities optimized for uh for storage workloads so those are kind of the four big things that we're focused on at the industry level from a connectivity perspective dave yeah and that makes a lot of sense and really resonates uh particularly as we have that shift from a cpu centric to a connectivity center because the other thing you said i mean you talk about 50x raid rebuild times you know one thing a couple of things you know in storage is if you ask the question what happens when something goes wrong because it's all about recovery you can't lose data and the other thing you mentioned is write latency which has always been you know the problem okay reads i can read out of cash but ultimately you've got to get it to where it's persisted so some real technical challenges there that you guys are dealing with absolutely dave yeah and uh these these are these are the type of problems that gets the engineers excited give them really tough tough technical problems to go solve i wonder if we could take a couple of examples or an example of scaling with a large customer for instance obviously hyperscalers or take a company like dell i mean they're a big company big customer take us through that so i we use the word scale a lot at broadcom we work with some of the industry leaders and data centers and oems and scale means different things to them so example if i'm working with a hyperscaler that is getting inundated with data and they need half a million storage controllers to store all that that data well their scale problem is can you deliver and dave you know how much of a hot topic that is these days so they need a partner that can scale from a delivery perspective but if i take a company like example dell that's very focused on storage from storage servers their acquisition of emc they have a very broad portfolio of data center storage offerings and scale to them from a broadcom from a connected by broadcom perspective means that you need to have the investment scale to meet their end-to-end requirements all the way from a low end storage connectivity solution for booting a server all the way up to a very high-end all-flash array or high-density hdd system so they want a company a partner that can invest and has a scale to invest to meet their end-to-end requirements second thing is their different products are unique and have different requirements and you need to adapt your collaboration model for example some products within dell portfolio might say i just want a storage adapter plug it in the operating system will automatically recognize it i need this turnkey i want to do minimal investment this is not an area of high differentiation for me at the other end of the spectrum they may have applications where they want deep integration with their management and our silicon tools so that they can deliver the highest quality highest performance to their customers so they need a partner that can scale from an r d investment perspective from a silicon software and hardware perspective but they also need a company that can scale from support and business model perspective and give them the flexibility that their end customers need so dell is a great company to work with we have a long lasting relationship with them and the relationship is very deep in some areas example server storage and it's also quite broad they they are adopters of the vast majority of our storage uh connectivity products well and i imagine it was i want to talk about the uniqueness of broadcom and again it's i'm in awe of the fact that somebody had the vision you guys your team uh obviously your ceo was one of the visionaries in the industry had the sense to to look out and say okay we can put these these pieces together so i would imagine a company like dell you've they're able to consolidate their their vendor their supplier base and push you for integration in an innovation in innovation how unique is that is the broadcom model what's compelling you know to your customers about that model so i think what's unique from a storage perspective is the breadth of the portfolio and also the scale at which we can invest so you know if you look at some of the things we talked about from a scale perspective how data centers throughout the world are getting inundated with data dave they need help and we need to equip them with cutting edge technology to increase performance drive down power improve reliability so so they need partners that in each of the the product categories that they you partner with them on you know we can invest with scale so that's i think one of the first things the second thing is if you look at this connectivity-centric data center you need multiple types of fabric and whether it be cloud customers or large oems they are organizing themselves to be able to look at things holistically they're no longer product company they're very data center architecture companies and um so it's good for them to have a partner that can look across product groups across division says okay this is the innovation we need to bring to market these are the problems we need to go solve and they really appreciate that and i think the last thing is a flexible business model within example my division we're we offer different business models different engagement and collaboration models with technology but there's another division that if you want to innovate at the silicon level and build custom silicon for you like many of the hyper scalers or other companies are doing that division is just focus on that so i i feel like broadcom is unique from a storage perspective its ability to innovate breadth a portfolio and the flexibility in the collaboration model to help our customers solve their customers problems so you're saying you can deal with merchant products slash open products or you can do highly you know high customization where does software differentiation fit into this model so it's it's actually one of the most important elements uh i think a lot of our customers take it for granted that will take care of the silicon we'll anticipate the requirements and deliver the performance that they need but from a software firmware driver utilities that is where a lot of differentiation lies some cases will offer an sdk model where you know customers can build their entire applications on top of that in some cases they want a complete turnkey solution where you take technology integrate it into server and the operating system recognizes it and you have out of box drivers from broadcom so we need to offer them that flexibility because you know their needs are quite quite broad there so last question what's the future of the business look like to jazz tremblay give us your point of view on that well uh it's it's fun i gotta tell you dave we're having uh we're having a great time we've got i've got a great team they're uh the world's experts on storage connectivity and working with them is a pleasure and we've got a rich great set of customers that are giving us cool problems to go solve and we're excited about it so i think this is really you know with the acceleration of all this digital transformation that we're seeing we're excited we're having fun and i think there's a lot of problems to be solved and we also have a responsibility i think the ecosystem in the industry is counting on our team to deliver the innovation from a storage connectivity perspective and i'll tell you dave we're having fun it's great but we take that responsibility uh pretty seriously jazz great stuff i really appreciate you laying all that out very important role you guys are playing you have a really unique perspective thank you thank you dave and thank you for watching this is dave vellante for the cube and we'll see you next time you

(upbeat music) >> For decades the technology industry had marched the cadence of Moore's law. It was a familiar pattern. System OEMs would design in the next generation of Intel microprocessors, every couple of years or so maybe bump up the memory ranges periodically and the supporting hardware would kind of go along for the ride, upgrading its performance and bandwidth. System designers then they might beef up the cache, maybe throwing some more spinning disc spindles at the equation to create a balanced environment. And this was pretty predictable and consistent in the pattern and was reasonably straightforward compared to is challenges. This has all changed. The confluence of cloud, distributed global networks, the diversity of applications, AI, machine learning and the massive growth of data outside of the data center requires new architectures to keep up. As we've reported the traditional Moore's Law curve is flattening. And along with that we've seen new packages with alternative processors like GPUs, NPUs, accelerators and the like and the rising importance of supporting hardware to offload tasks like storage and security. And it's created a massive challenge to connect all these components together, the storage, the memories and all of the enabling hardware and do so securely at very low latency at scale and of course, cost effectively. This is the topic of today's segment. The shift from a world that is CPU centric to one where the connectivity of the various hardware components is where much of the innovation is occurring. And to talk about that, there is no company who knows more about out this topic than Broadcom. And with us today is Jas Tremblay, who is general manager, data center solutions group at Broadcom. Jas, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hey Dave, thanks for having me, really appreciate it. >> Yeah, you bet. Now Broadcom is a company that a lot of people might not know about. I mean, but the vast majority of the internet traffic flows through Broadcom products. (chuckles) Like pretty much all of it. It's a company with trailing 12 month revenues of nearly 29 billion and a 240 billion market cap. Jas, what else should people know about Broadcom? >> Well, Dave, 99% of the internet traffic goes through Broadcom silicon or devices. And I think what people are not often aware of is how breadth it is. It starts with the devices, phones and tablets that use our Wi-Fi technology or RF filters. And then those connect to access points either at home, at work or public access points using our Wi-Fi technology. And if you're working from home, you're using a residential or broadband gateway and that uses Broadcom technology also. From there you go to access networks, core networks and eventually you'll work your way into the data center, all connected by Broadcom. So really we're at the heart of enabling this connectivity ecosystem and we're at the core of it, we're a technology company. We invest about 5 billion a year in R&D. And as you were saying our last year we achieved 27.5 billion of revenue. And our mission is really to connect the ecosystem to enable what you said, this transformation around the data-centric world. >> So talk about your scope of responsibility. What's your role generally and specifically with storage? >> So I've been with the company for 16 years and I head up the data center solutions group which includes three product franchises PCA fabric, storage connectivity and Broadcom ethernet nics. So my charter, my team's charter is really server connectivity inside the data center. >> And what specifically is Broadcom doing in storage, Jas? >> So it's been quite a journey. Over the past eight years we've made a series of acquisition and built up a pretty impressive storage portfolio. This first started with LSI and that's where I came from. And the team here came from LSI that had two product franchises around storage. The first one was server connectivity, HBA raid, expanders for SSDs and HDDs. The second product group was actually chips that go inside the hard drives. So SOCs and pre amps. So that was an acquisition that we made and actually that's how I came into the Broadcom group through LSI. The next acquisition we made was PLX, the industry's leader in PCIe fabrics. They'd been doing PCIe switches for about 15 years. We acquired the company and really saw an acceleration in the requirements for NVMe attached and AI ML fabrics, very specialized, low latency fabrics. After that, we acquired a large system and software company, Brocade, and Dave if you recall, Brocade they're the market leader in fiber channel switching, this is where if you're financial or government institution you want to build a mission critical, ultra secure really best in class storage network. Following Brocade acquisition we acquired Emulex that is now the number one provider of fiber channel adapters inside servers. And the last acquisition for this puzzle was actually Broadcom where Avago acquired Broadcom and took on the Broadcom name. And there we acquired ethernet switching capabilities and ethernet adapters that go into storage servers or external storage systems. So with all this it's been quite the journey to build up this portfolio. We're number one in each of these storage product categories. And we now have four divisions that are focused on storage connectivity. >> That's quite remarkable when you think about it. I mean, I know all these companies that you were talking about and they were very quality companies but they were kind of bespoke in the fact that you had the vision to kind of connect the dots and now take responsibility for that integration. We're going to talk about what that means in terms of competitive advantage, but I wonder if we could zoom out and maybe you could talk about the key storage challenges and elaborate a little bit on why connectivity is now so important. Like what are the trends that are driving that shift that we talked about earlier from a CPU centric world to one that's connectivity centric? >> I think at Broadcom, we recognize the importance of storage and storage connectivity. And if you look at data centers whether it be private, public cloud or hybrid data centers, they're getting inundated with data. If you look at the digital universe it's growing at about 23% a day. So over a course of four to five years you're doubling the amount of new information and that poses really two key challenges for the infrastructure. The first one is you have to take all this data and for a good chunk of it, you have to store it, be able to access it and protect it. The second challenge is you actually have to go and analyze and process this data and doing this at scale that's the key challenge and what we're seeing these data centers getting a tsunami of data. And historically they've been CPU centric architectures. And what that means is the CPU's at the heart of the data center. And a lot of the workloads are processed by software running on the CPU. We believe that we're currently transforming the architecture from CPU centric to connectivity centric. And what we mean by connectivity centric is you architect your data center thinking about the connectivity first. And the goal of the connectivity is to use all the components inside the data center, the memory, the spinning media, the flash storage, the networking, the specialized accelerators, the FPGA all these elements and use them for what they're best at to process all this data. And the goal Dave is really to drive down power and deliver the performance so that we can achieve all the innovation we want inside the data centers. So it's really a shift from CPU centric to bringing in more specialized components and architecting the connectivity inside the data center to help. We think that's a really important part. >> So you have this need for connectivity at scale, you mentioned, and you're dealing with massive, massive amounts of data. I mean, we're going to look back to the last decade and say, oh, you've seen nothing compared to when we get to 2030, but at the same time you have to control costs. So what are the technical challenges to achieving that vision? >> So it's really challenging. It's not that complex to build up faster, bigger solution, if you have no cost or power budget. And really the key challenges that our team is facing working with customers is first, I'd say it's architectural challenges. So we would all like to have one fabric that aim to connect all the devices and bring us all the characteristics that we need. But the reality is, we can't do that. So you need distinct fabrics inside the data center and you need them to work together. You'll need an ethernet backbone. In some cases, you'll need a fiber channel network. In some cases, you'll need a small fabric for thousands or hundreds of thousands of HDDs. You will need PCIe fabrics for AI ML servers. And one of the key architectural challenges is which fabric do you use when and how do you develop these fabrics to meet their purpose built needs. That's one thing. The second architectural challenge, Dave is what I challenge my team with is example, how do I double bandwidth while reducing net power, double bandwidth, reducing net power? How do I take a storage controller and increase the IOPS by 10X and will allocate only 50% more power budget? So that equation requires tremendous innovation. And that's really what we focus on and power is becoming more and more important in that equation. So you've got decisions from an architecture perspective as to which fabric to use. You've got this architectural challenge around we need to innovate and do things smarter, better, to drive down power while delivering more performance. Then if you take those things together the problem statement becomes more complex. So you've had these silicon devices with complex firmware on them that need to inter-operate with multiple devices. They're getting more and more complex. So there's execution challenges and what we need to do. And what we're we're investing to do is shift left quality. So to do these complex devices that they come out time to market with high quality. And one of the key things Dave that we've invested in is emulation of the environment before you tape out your silicon. So effectively taking the application software, running it on an emulation environment, making sure that works, running your tests before you tape out and that ensures quality silicon. So it's challenging, but the team loves challenges. And that's kind of what we're facing, on one hand architectural challenges, on the other hand a new level of execution challenges. >> So you're compressing the time to final tape out versus maybe traditional techniques. And then, you mentioned architecture, am I right Jas that you're essentially from an architectural standpoint trying to minimize the... 'cause your latency's so important you're trying to minimize the amount of data that you have to move around and actually bringing compute to the data. Is that the right way to think about it? >> Well, I think that there's multiple parts of the problem. One of them is you need to do more data transactions, example data protection with rate algorithms. We need to do millions of transactions per second. And the only way to achieve this with the minimal power impact is to hardware accelerate these. That's one piece of investment. The other investment is, you're absolutely right, Dave. So it's shuffling the data around the data center. So in the data center in some cases you need to have multiple pieces of the puzzle, multiple ingredients processing the same data at the same time and you need advanced methodologies to share the data and avoid moving it all over the data center. So that's another big piece of investment that we're focused on. >> So let's stay on that because I see this as disruptive. You talk about spending $5 billion a year in R&D and talk a little bit more about the disruptive technologies or the supportive technologies that you're introducing specifically to support this vision. >> So let's break it down in a couple big industry problems that our team is focused on. So the first one is I'll take an enterprise workload database. If you want the fastest running database you want to utilize local storage and NVMe based drives and you need to protect that data. And raid is the mechanism of choice to protect your data in local environments. And there what we need to do is really just do the transactions a lot faster. Historically the storage has been a bit of a bottleneck in these types of applications. So example our newest generation product. We're doubling the bandwidth, increasing IOPS by four X, but more importantly we're accelerating raid rebuilds by 50X. And that's an important Dave, if you are using a database in some cases, you limit the size of that database based on how fast you can do those rebuilds. So this 50X acceleration in rebuilds is something we're getting a lot of good feedback on for customers. The last metric we're really focused on is write latency. So how fast can the CPU send the write to the storage connectivity subsystem and committed to drives? And we're improving that by 60X generation over generation. So we're talking fully loaded latency, 10 microseconds. So from an enterprise workload it's about data protection, much, much faster using NVMe drives. That's one big problem. The other one is if you look at Dave YouTube, Facebook, TikTok the amount of user generated content specifically video content that they're producing on an hour by hour basis is mind boggling. And the hyperscale customers are really counting on us to help them scale the connectivity of hundreds of thousands of hard drive to store and access all that data in a very reliable way. So there we're leading the industry in the transition to 24 gig SaaS and multi actuator drives. Third big problem is around AI ML servers. So these are some of the highest performance servers, that they basically need super low latency connectivity between GPGPUs, networking, NVMe drives, CPUs and orchestrate that all together. And the fabric of choice for that is PCIe fabric. So here, we're talking about 115 nanosecond latency in a PCIe fabric, fully nonblocking, very reliable. And here we're helping the industry transition from PCA gen four to PCIe gen five. And the last piece is okay, I've got a AI ML server, I have a storage system with hard drives or a storage server in the enterprise space. All these devices, systems need to be connected to the ethernet backbone. And my team is heavily investing in ethernet mix transitioning to 100 gig, 200 gig, 400 gig and putting capabilities optimized for storage workloads. So those are kind of the four big things that we're focused on at the industry level, from a connectivity perspective, Dave. >> And that makes a lot of sense and really resonates particularly as we have that shift from a CPU centric to a connectivity centric. And the other thing you said, I mean, you're talking about 50X rate rebuild times, a couple of things you know in storage is if you ask the question, what happens when something goes wrong? 'Cause it's all about recovery, you can't lose data. And the other thing you mentioned is write latency, which has always been the problem. Okay, reads, I can read out cache but ultimately you've got to get it to where it's persisted. So some real technical challenges there that you guys are dealing with. >> Absolutely, Dave. And these are the type of problems that gets the engineers excited. Give them really tough technical problems to go solve. >> I wonder if we could take a couple of examples or an example of scaling with a large customer, for instance obviously hyperscalers or take a company like Dell. I mean they're big company, big customer. Take us through that. >> So we use the word scale a lot at Broadcom. We work with some of the industry leaders and data centers and OEMs and scale means different things to them. So example, if I'm working with a hyperscaler that is getting inundated with data and they need half a million storage controllers to store all that data, well their scale problem is, can you deliver? And Dave, you know how much of a hot topic that is these days. So they need a partner that can scale from a delivery perspective. But if I take a company like example Dell that's very focused on storage, from storage servers, their acquisition of EMC. They have a very broad portfolio of data center storage offerings and scale to them from a connected by Broadcom perspective means that you need to have the investment scale to meet their end to end requirements. All the way from a low end storage connectivity solution for booting a server all the way up to a very high end all flash array or high density HDD system. So they want a company a partner that can invest and has a scale to invest to meet their end to end requirements. Second thing is their different products are unique and have different requirements and you need to adapt your collaboration model. So example, some products within Dell portfolio might say, I just want a storage adaptor, plug it in, the operating system will automatically recognize it. I need this turnkey. I want to do minimal investment, is not an area of high differentiation for me. At the other end of the spectrum they may have applications where they want deep integration with their management and our silicon tools so that they can deliver the highest quality, highest performance to their customers. So they need a partner that can scale from an R&D investment perspective from silicon software and hardware perspective but they also need a company that can scale from support and business model perspective and give them the flexibility that their end customers need. So Dell is a great company to work with. We have a long lasting relationship with them and the relationship is very deep in some areas, example server storage, and is also quite broad. They are adopters of the vast majority of our storage connectivity products. >> Well, and I imagine it was. Well I want to talk about the uniqueness of Broadcom again, I'm in awe of the fact that somebody had the vision, you guys, your team obviously your CEO was one of the visionaries of the industry, had the sense to look out and say, okay, we can put these pieces together. So I would imagine a company like Dell, they're able to consolidate their vendor their supplier base and push you for integration and innovation. How unique is the Broadcom model? What's compelling to your customer about that model? >> So I think what's unique from a storage perspective is the breadth of the portfolio and also the scale at which we can invest. So if you look at some of the things we talked about from a scale perspective how data centers throughout the world are getting inundated with data, Dave, they need help. And we need to equip them with cutting edge technology to increase performance, drive down power, improve reliability. So they need partners that in each of the product categories that you partner with them on, we can invest with scale. So that's, I think one of the first things. The second thing is, if you look at this connectivity centric data center you need multiple types of fabric. And whether it be cloud customers or large OEMs they are organizing themselves to be able to look at things holistically. They're no longer product company, they're very data center architecture companies. And so it's good for them to have a partner that can look across product groups across divisions says, okay this is the innovation we need to bring to market. These are the problems we need to go solve and they really appreciate that. And I think the last thing is a flexible business model. Within example, my division, we offer different business models, different engagement and collaboration models with technology. But there's another division that if you want to innovate at the silicon level and build custom silicon for you like many of the hyperscalers or other companies are doing that division is just focus on that. So I feel like Broadcom is unique from a storage perspective it's ability to innovate, breadth of portfolio and the flexibility in the collaboration model to help our customers solve their customers problems. >> So you're saying you can deal with merchant products slash open products or you can do high customization. Where does software differentiation fit into this model? >> So it's actually one of the most important elements. I think a lot of our customers take it for granted that will take care of the silicon will anticipate the requirements and deliver the performance that they need, but from a software, firmware, driver, utilities that is where a lot of differentiation lies. Some cases we'll offer an SDK model where customers can build their entire applications on top of that. In some cases they want to complete turnkey solution where you take technology, integrate it into server and the operating system recognizes it and you have outer box drivers from Broadcom. So we need to offer them that flexibility because their needs are quite broad there. >> So last question, what's the future of the business look like to Jas Tremblay? Give us your point of view on that. >> Well, it's fun. I got to tell you, Dave, we're having a great time. I've got a great team, they're the world's experts on storage connectivity and working with them is a pleasure. And we've got a rich, great set of customers that are giving us cool problems to go solve and we're excited about it. So I think this is really, with the acceleration of all this digital transformation that we're seeing, we're excited, we're having fun. And I think there's a lot of problems to be solved. And we also have a responsibility. I think the ecosystem and the industry is counting on our team to deliver the innovation from a storage connectivity perspective. And I'll tell you, Dave, we're having fun. It's great but we take that responsibility pretty seriously. >> Jas, great stuff. I really appreciate you laying all that out. Very important role you guys are playing. You have a really unique perspective. Thank you. >> Thank you, Dave. >> And thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time.

(exciting, upbeat music) >> (Announcer) Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge '17. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> We're back. Dave Vellante with Jeff Frick. This is theCube and we're here at ServiceNow Knowledge '17. Stanley Toh is here, he's the Global IT Director at semiconductor manufacturer Broadcom. Stanley, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Nice to be here. >> So, semiconductor, hot space right now. Things are going crazy and it's a good market, booming. That's good, it's always good to be in a hot space. But we're here at Knowledge. Maybe talk a little bit about your role, and then we'll get into what you're doing with ServiceNow. >> Sure. You're right. Semiconductor is booming. But we don't do anything sexy. Everything is components that go into your iPhones and stuff like that. They do the sexy stuff. We do the thing that make it work. So, I'm the what we call the Enterprise and User Services Director, so basically anything that touches the end user, from the help desk to collaboration to your PC support desk, everything is under. Basically anything that touches the end user, even onboarding, and then, now with the latest, we actually moved our old customer support portal to even ServiceNow CSM. >> Okay, so what led you to ServiceNow? Maybe take us back, and take us through the before and the after. >> Okay. Broadcom Limited, before we changed our name to Broadcom, we were Avago Technologies. We are very cloud centric. Anything that we can move to the cloud, we moved to the cloud. So we were the first multi-billion dollar company to move to Google, back in 2007. That was 10 years ago. And then we never stopped since. We have Opta, we have Workday. And if you look at it, all this cloud technology works so well with ServiceNow. And ServiceNow is a platform that has all the API and connectors to all these other cloud platforms. So, when we were looking and evaluating, first as just the ITSM replacement, we selected ServiceNow because of the ease of integration. But as we get into ServiceNow, and as we learn ServiceNow, we found that it's not just an ITSM platform. You can use it for HR, for finance, for legal, for facilities. Recently, probably about six months ago, we launched the HR module. And then three weeks ago, we went live with a CSM portal for the external customer. >> When you say you go back to 2007 with Google, you're talking about what, Google Docs? >> Everything. >> Dave: Everything. >> Email, calendar, docs, sites, Drive, but it was unknown. >> Dave: All the productivity stuff. >> Everything. >> Dave: Outsourced stuff. >> They were unknown then, >> Jeff: Right, right, right. >> And it's a risk. >> So what was the conversation to take that risk? Because obviously there was a lot of concern at the enterprise level on some of these cloud services beyond test/dev in the early days. Obviously you made the right bet, it worked out pretty well. (Stanley laughing) But I'm curious, what were the conversations and why did you ultimately decide to make that bet? >> Okay. So 2007 was just after the downturn. >> Jeff: Right. >> So everyone was looking at cost, at supportability. But at the same time, the mobile phone, the smart phone is just exploding in the market. So we want something that is very flexible, very scalable, and very easy to integrate, plus also give you mobility. So that's why we went with Google as the first cloud platform, but then we started adding. So right now, we can basically do everything on your smart phone. We have Opta as our single sign-on. From one portal, I go everywhere. >> Dave: Okay, so that's good. So you talked about some of the criteria for the platform. How has that affected how you do business, how you do IT business? >> See, IT has always been looked upon as a cost center. And we are always slow, legacy system, hard to use, we don't listen to you. (Jeff laughing) >> Dave: What do those guys do? >> You know, why are we paying those guys, right? And then you look at all the consumer stuff. They are sexy, they are mobile, they have pretty pictures. Now all your internal users want the same experience. So, the experience has changed. The old UNIX command key doesn't work anymore. They want something touch, GUI, mobile. They want the feel, the color, you know. >> That might be the best description (Stanley laughing) of the consumerization of IT, Dave, that we've ever had on theCUBE. >> It's really honest. Coming from an IT person, it is, it is honest. And now you've driven ServiceNow into other areas beyond IT. >> Stanley: Yes. >> You mentioned HR. >> HR. We went live six months ago. >> Okay. And these other areas, are you thinking about it, looking at it, or? >> So we are also looking with legal, because they have a lot of legal documents and NDAs and stuff like that. And ServiceNow have a very nice integration to DocuSign and Vox. So we are looking at that. But the latest one, we went live three weeks ago, is the CSM, the customer support management portal. And that one actually replaced one of our legacy system that has a stack of sixteen application running. And we collapsed that, and went live on ServiceNow CSM three weeks ago. >> And what has been, two impacts - the business impact, and, I'm curious, is it the culture impact. You sort of set it up as the attitude. We had fun with it, but it's true. What's the business impact? And what has the cultural impact been? >> The last few years, we have been doing a lot of acquisition. So we have been bringing in a lot of new BU's. Business units. And they want things to move fast, and we want to integrate them into one brand. So speed and agility is key when you do acquisitions. So that's why we are moving into a platform where we can integrate all these new companies easily. We found that in ServiceNow and we can integrate them. So for example, when we acquired Broadcom Corporation, they have 18,000 employees. We onboarded them on day one, and usually when you do an acquisition, they don't give you the employee information until the last minute. Two days, all I need, is to bring them all on, onboarded into my collaboration suite. I only need two days of the information, and on day one, Turn it on, they are live. Their information is in, they have an email account. All their information is in ServiceNow. They call one help desk, they call our help desk, they get all the help and services. So it's fully integrated on day one itself. >> And you guys also own LSI now, right? >> Yes, LSI. >> Emulex? >> Emulex, PLX. >> PLX. >> The latest acquisition is Brocade, which we will close in the summer. And then, the rumored Toshiba NAND business. So, yeah, we are doing a lot of acquisitions. >> Yeah, quite a roll-up there. >> Correct. So as you can see, they are all very different companies. So when they come in, they have different culture. They have different workflow, they have different processes. But if you integrate them into a platform that we are very familiar right now, it's the consumerized look and feel, it's very easy to bring them in. >> And that is the cultural change that has occurred. >> Yes, it's a huge, >> So do people love IT now? >> They still hate IT. (Jeff and Dave laughing) They still say iT is a cost center. But right now, they are coming around. They see that we are bringing value to them. So right now, IT is just not to provide you the basic. IT is to enable the business to be better and more competitive. >> A true partner for the business. >> Yes, correct. >> Stanley, thanks very much for coming to theCUBE. It was great to hear your story, we appreciate it. >> Stanley: Thanks for having me. >> You're welcome. All right, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. This is theCUBE, we're live from ServiceNow Knowledge '17. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)